


but i have promises to keep (and miles to go before i sleep)

by newvision



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, M/M, References to Depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-10
Updated: 2019-05-10
Packaged: 2020-02-29 14:01:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18779716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newvision/pseuds/newvision
Summary: It is 6:30am. Seungcheol has 27 things on his to-do list and a headache.





	but i have promises to keep (and miles to go before i sleep)

It is 6:30am. Seungcheol has 27 things on his to-do list and a headache.

He hits snooze and turns over in bed. Presses the crown of his head into the enormous bolster that’s crushed against his body in the tiny expanse of his dorm bed, all the while some shameful part of him wishes it was human heat beside him and not just an inanimate excuse to bury himself further in bed. He isn’t sure this would be any easier with another person around, but it’s still better to imagine a life where he doesn’t wake up alone. It’s 6:35am now. 5 minutes of wishing he was someplace else are just another 5 minutes he’ll never get back. He stands, rubs his eyes, and pushes the pillows away. He wasn’t going to be able to fall back asleep anyway.

Flicking on the light, he stumbles through his apartment, digging the heels of his hands into his eyes as he leans over the bathroom sink and wonders when getting out of bed became a herculean task. The headache has begun to throb right behind his eye sockets, and for a moment he contemplates what it would take for him to reach behind his eyeballs and squeeze, just for it to stop hurting so much. In his temples, there’s a buzzing like an entire nest of hornets waiting to be unleashed into his brain. He’s not sure that they’d necessarily make things worse. It’s week 3 of the semester and he’s convinced that he’s already failing all of his classes.

And yet -- and yet there are things to be done. He eyes his laptop which sits untouched on the kitchen counter that he shares with his roommates, Jeonghan and Joshua. They’re not awake yet, and Seungcheol wonders what time they got in the night before. The pair are notorious for being party animals, even though they’d nearly bust a lung laughing at him when Seungcheol had first said as much to them.

“You sound like a 50-year old,” Joshua had told him, scrunching his face. “I’ve never heard a young person use that phrase before.”

“This is why you should come out with us more, like old times,” Jeonghan supplies helpfully, already maneuvering his way beside Seungcheol so he can slide his arm around his. “What do you even do alone in the flat all day?” Seungcheol pulls away.

“I can’t, I have to study,” he tells them flatly, not wanting to meet their eyes.

They’re the first friends he’d made on campus in the previous year, having been in the same freshman orientation group, so he’d say that they know him decently well. After all, they’d spent their first few months at university getting absolutely sloshed together. They’d sit at hipster bars tucked away in the upper floors of old buildings, knees touching as they downed shots and slurred through eulogies of everything they’d wanted to do, to be, before college. Before higher education became a priority and suddenly they were running out of time. In moments like those, they were just themselves, without obligations and without pretense. In those days, he could’ve said whatever he wanted to them, and they’d listen. Sometimes, he can still feel the weight of Joshua’s hands around him and Jeonghan as they crashed their way through the winding streets in the wee hours of the morning, feeling like they owned the world and that there was no one who could ever take that from them.

And then his grades had come back, a slippery slope of missed classes and assignments handed in past the deadline. He’d begun to spend more hours in, more time with a bottle of soju and Adobe PDF blinding his eyes instead of the pulsating lights of any of the clubs they frequented. Nights became a routine of waving a distracted goodbye to Joshua and Jeonghan as they waltzed out the door in sparkling outfits, refusing Jeonghan’s pleading head tilt that says come on, it’s just one night out. He knows better than anyone that one night out leads to another, and another, and suddenly all the days have blurred together and you have 57 assignments due even though you’re only taking 5 classes.

So, instead he settles. He lets his friends live a life where they see him for maybe 20 minutes a day, even though this is a shared flat. He starts assignments weeks before they’re due, haphazardly browsing the library archives online for the one article that’ll make everything click together. He highlights random phrases that could be important, and refuses to think about how much his eyes hurt or when his last meal was. Hunger doesn’t register to him much anymore - he alternates between being too tired or too awake. When he’s tired, he presses his hands together and lets his forehead rest on the cold wood of his desk, jolting upright only when the sharp edge begins to leave a mark against his skin. When he’s awake, he jumps from website to website; first on the university’s archives, then to recipes for cakes and coffees he’ll never make, adding items to a cart he’ll never check out.

Opening his laptop on this morning, he sees he’s left the browser open to a page for homemade strawberry shortcake. An awake night, then. He doesn’t usually remember how his nights end. That’s one commonality between the life he’d had before and the one which he occupies now. Memory becomes fluid, and he is reminded of the spiderwebs he used to claw through as a child, the way the sticky wisps would cling to his fingers in the semblance of a detailed pattern never to be made whole again. He used to wipe his hands on his pants, joining the world again and paying no mind to the destruction he’d left in his wake. Now, he wishes he could sit down and piece all the fragments of his life back together again, even though that probably wouldn’t do much to make him feel better.

Instead, he gets to the to-do list. They’re the only way for him to feel even the slightest bit as if he knows what he’s doing, even if he ends up not completing most of the tasks for the day. They’re also a way for him to makes sure he keeps himself alive, not that he’d admit it to anyone. The one time Joshua had watched him diligently make a bulleted set of tasks for the coming day which spanned almost half a sheet of paper, Seungcheol had only smiled meekly and told him it was a list of deadlines for the semester. Nodding his understanding, Joshua had floated off to his room without a second thought. It’s only after he leaves that Seungcheol relaxes, uncovering the sheet of paper whose list begins with “1. get out of bed.”

  
\---

6:30am again. It’s storming today, the wind blowing through the trees so hard that they bend and sway as if they’re about to snap in half. Seungcheol rises, alone, shuffles his way to the kitchen to make himself a cup of strong tea even though it won’t do anything to erase the fatigue that sits viscous and dark in the back of his brain. As he watches the milk swirl into the amber of his tea, he images the sludge that sits in the back of his head. He thinks that it must be pretty thick by now, fusing the metaphorical cogs of his brain together until they can no longer turn. Like an oil spillage, only instead of making everything slippery and almost intangible, it’s more like someone put his life on slow-motion without warning. That’d certainly explain why the days have been passing the way they have, assignments still incomplete even after he’d spent a whole day staring at Microsoft Word.

He feels a splash of cold over his socked feet. Belatedly, he realises he’s spilt the milk all over the counter. It’s the sludge, is all he can think as he goes to get a rag to mop up his mess. As he reaches out for it, he knocks over the empty peanut butter jar that holds all their cutlery. The floor sparkles with glints of silver in the pale blue light of the storm, and he stands silent for a moment, defeated.

“Cheol? Is that you?” he hears a bleary voice call from their shared bathroom. He’s woken Joshua up.

“Ah yeah, sorry,” Seungcheol answers as he bends to pick up a fork from next to his foot. He steps in the milk again. “Fuck,” he hisses. These are his favourite pair of socks, printed with sunflowers gifted to him by Joshua on his birthday when he’d told him that he ‘reminds him of sunflowers, that’s all.’ He wonders if Joshua still thinks that.

“What’re you doing up so early?” Joshua asks, stifling a yawn as he emerges from the bathroom.

“Just making tea,” Seungcheol lies easily. He doesn’t feel like having to explain why he gets so little done even though he’s awake 20 hours a day.

“You need forks for that?” Joshua wonders as he steps forward carefully, flicking on the lights. “Not the wisest idea to be picking knives up in the dark, either,” he jokes, but stops when he sees Seungcheol’s face in the yellow light of their living room.

“Jesus, Cheol, you look awful,” he says, like he can’t hold it back. Seungcheol shifts his weight onto his other foot, both now damp with spilled milk. He needs to clean that up.

“Yeah, I haven’t been sleeping too well,” he tries to say it as inconsequentially as he can. “Midterms, y’know?”

“Midterms aren’t for another 2 weeks,” Joshua tells him, concern starting to creep over his face. It pulls his eyebrows together and makes him look comically unlike himself, no longer the same boy who’s always casting coy glances at him and Jeonghan, or feigning shyness as he haggles a bartender for a discount. Seungcheol wants to laugh, but for some reason no sound emerges. “Cheol, are you okay?”

“Of course,” he answers, but it comes out far too light and breezy to be believable, let alone true. “Of course,” he tries again, deeper and slower this time.

“Right,” Joshua responds, clearly unconvinced. “You’re standing in milk.”

“I spilt some,” Seungcheol tells him. “I was gonna clean it up.”

“I can see that,” Joshua says, slower this time, as if he’s taking in the whole scenario. Then, out of the blue: “Are you drunk?”

“No,” he answers, easier this time since it isn’t a lie. “Just tired. Spaced out, y’know?” he tries to elaborate, waving a hand at the general mess he’s created. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”

“So you’ve said,” Joshua looks as though he’s pondering the whole scenario before he continues, finally standing up straight. “Listen, why don’t I help you clean this up, and then we can both go back to bed?” he offers, already making a beeline to grab the rag out of Seungcheol’s hands. And then, offhandedly: “Change your socks.”

\---

“Hey, Seungcheol?” Jeonghan calls from the couch, where he’s sprawled across Joshua’s upright figure. Seungcheol makes a noncommittal noise of acknowledgement, but doesn’t say much else. His primary focus at the moment is writing a 5-page paper on the Italian Renaissance, and he doesn’t even have a topic, let alone an outline. It’s due in 10 hours, according to his to-do list.

“Seungcheol-ah,” Jeonghan calls again, more insistently. Seungcheol grunts, and doesn’t move. The university’s archives are being of no help to him today. His fingers hover over the keyboard, unsure of what to search for next. He wonders how many different ways he can type the phrase “michelangelo individualistic painting” before the server gives up on showing him any results. He needs a drink. He needs to finish this paper. He needs to get another item off the list before he can sleep.

And then, a throw pillow flies across the room and hits him in the face.

He yelps, blinking up at Jeonghan’s figure which now looms over him. He’d apparently ignored Jeonghan enough for him to get up and walk across the room using his legs, meaning he was in a decent amount of trouble. He makes a mental note to pick up Jeonghan’s favourite strawberry mochi ice cream at the store the next time he’s there.

“Sorry, sorry,” Seungcheol concedes, placing the pillow in his lap so he can face Jeonghan with some form of protection on him. “What is it?”

Jeonghan is frowning at him, arms crossed. Bad news, surely. “Do you want to come out with us tonight? We’re not doing anything crazy, just getting meat and then coming back to work on papers.” Before the words are out of his mouth, Seungcheol already has a reply lined up.

“I can’t today,” he says, and the grimace that tears its way across Jeonghan’s face is unlike any expression of disappointment he’s seen from him before. “Really. This paper is due so soon, and I don’t even have an outline.”

Jeonghan blinks at him for a moment, eyes hard. And then, unexpectedly: “What class is it for?”

“Huh?”

“What class is the paper for?” Jeonghan repeats, slower this time. “If either me or Josh has taken it before, we can help you. And you can come for dinner.”

“No, that’s-” Seungcheol starts to reply, but withers under Jeonghan’s unrelenting, unamused stare. “It’s for Intro to Art History,” he says instead, chewing at his lower lip and flicking his fingernail absentmindedly against the ‘H’ key. The search bar now reads ‘hhhhh’. Same, Seungcheol thinks.

“So you’re coming with us,” Jeonghan decides. “I took that class first semester, I can tell you what sources to use. Now go put on a hoodie and let’s go.”

\---

  
It’s 11:30pm. The three of them sit, leaning in towards each other in the too-warm interior of the restaurant. The fumes of grilled meat and vegetables wafting through the air are making him feel grimy all over. He needs to go home and take a shower. He needs to go home and write that paper. He needs to go home and do everything on his to-do list, and only when it’s done will he be able to sleep for a few minutes.

Him and Jeonghan are pressed flush against each other, a constant line running from their hips down to their thighs. The other boy seems to be radiating heat, making it even stuffier. Seungcheol’s hoodie now seems unnecessary and more of an inconvenience than anything. Across them, Joshua uses his chopstick to poke serenely at a piece of enoki mushroom sizzling on the grill, now slightly blackened due to their lack of observation.

“Are we going home soon?” Seungcheol asks, finally breaking the silence that seems to have settled over their table. This never used to happen in the old days. When they got drunk together, when they used to dance through the streets searching for their next destination like they were nomads traversing an empty expanse of earth. And sometimes, they were. But today, Seungcheol feels more detached from them than usual, even though he’s been without them for so long. He wonders if this is his fault, even though he knows it must be. Nothing’s changed but him.

“Do you want to?” Jeonghan asks, spearing a piece of tteokbokki from his bowl. “I’m not full yet.”

“Oh,” Seungcheol says, even though he really wants to leave. He needs to go home, needs to finish everything on the list. The list is what’s important here. If he doesn’t finish the list, he can’t sleep.

They sit in silence for a few more minutes, punctuated only by the sounds of meat sizzling. And then, finally, thankfully, Joshua speaks. Hopefully they can go home now. He wants the cold bottle of soju that’s sitting in the back of their fridge. That’d been on the list. Drink soju (2 shots). Write art history paper. In that order, specifically.

“Cheol,”Joshua starts, and already his voice is heavy with the weight of bad news. Seungcheol stills, waiting for the ball to drop. “Have you considered...stopping?” There’s a beat of silence, and Seungcheol blinks at him unsurely. All of a sudden, he’s very conscious of Jeonghan gently pressing his palm against his own.

“School,” Joshua elaborates, although he’s clearly uncomfortable. Among them, the sounds of the restaurant have faded to a dull buzzing in Seungcheol’s ears. “Like a leave of absence.”

“Why?” is the first thing Seungcheol can say, although he understands perfectly well why. His friends can see him failing. He’d tried to hard to keep his shortcomings under wraps, but apparently he couldn’t do that properly either.

“Have you seen yourself lately?” Jeonghan interjects, clutching Seungcheol’s hand tighter under the table. For a second, he clings to that warmth, because he assumes it’s all he has since the rest of his world seems to be coming down around him. “You don’t sleep. You barely eat. There’s soju in the fridge like all the time --”

“What Jeonghan is trying to say,” Joshua cuts him off with a withering glance, which Jeonghan responds to with a swift kick, “is that you’re driving yourself insane. And we can see it. I mean, for God’s sake, I found you absolutely spaced out and stepping in milk the other day.”

“I wasn’t drunk,” Seungcheol says helplessly, as if it would do anything to better the situation.

“I know,” they say in unison, and he wonders how long they’ve been rehearsing for this.   
There are about a million different things he could say at this point. He debates getting angry, a shouting match in which he calls them out on not believing in him and then work twice as hard to pull through -- even though that might kill him. He could get upset, lament over the idea that they want him gone and risk tearing them farther apart -- which might also kill him. But Joshua is still looking at him with his stupidly kind eyes and Jeonghan hasn’t blinked in the past 15 seconds, so he settles on quiet acceptance. He’s too tired to argue, and his mind has gone empty and silent for once in the face of tangible confrontation. This is proof, some sick part of him thinks. This is finally proof that you’re doing too much. Now, you can stop.

“Okay,” he agrees, so quietly that he isn’t sure he’s said it. Then Joshua leans back against his seat, slumping with relief, and Jeonghan has his head pressed into Seungcheol’s shoulder and everything becomes painfully real. He’s leaving. He has to leave. He can’t go on like this, stumbling half-asleep through the rest of his days.

“Thank god,”Joshua mumbles, reaching a hand across the table, inviting Seungcheol to slide his palm into it. At his side, Jeonghan has curled into his hoodie, and his blonde hair tickles his neck. Seeing Joshua’s eyes flutter shut in relief and Jeonghan’s hands curling into the soft fabric of his jacket, the walls of the room around them get a little less suffocating. The sludge in the back of his brain loosens a little, and something he thought to be long-dead begins to turn, It’s only then, with the comfort of his two best friends in the world pressed against him and the silence of an empty restaurant, that he finally cries.

\---

  
9am, three weeks later. Seungcheol stands with half his life packed into little suitcases, waiting at the train station. On either side, Jeonghan and Joshua have their arms curled around him, steady reminders of what awaits him when he returns. He refuses to consider an ‘if’. ‘If’ gives him a way out. ‘If’ is a poorly thought-out escape route that leaves him with no friends, no degree, and probably no job. ‘If’ is the thing he won’t let himself think about for fear that he’ll take his chances.

“You’ll come back,”Jeonghan says, as if he can read Seungcheol’s mind. It’s not a question. He turns the word over in his mind for a second. ‘You’ll - a contraction of you will. You will come back,’ he thinks to himself slowly. You will come back.

“And when you do, we’ll be waiting,” Joshua adds, nudging him. “We’ll leave your bed made with that one strawberry-print blanket you like so much, and we’ll eat Samyang at 3am, and we’ll study together. Like old times,” he goes on, and Seungcheol can almost see it all. Except.

“I’ll be a semester behind, though,” he blurts, rocking on his heels.

“So?” Jeonghan asks, undaunted. “We’re friends with Wonwoo and Soonyoung, aren’t we? And they’re not in the same year as us.”

Slowly, Seungcheol nods. “I guess. I just thought that--”

“You thought wrong,” Jeonghan starts before he can finish. “We’ll be waiting for you. So don’t you dare run away, Choi Seungcheol.” He can’t help but laugh at this, the absurdity of the whole situation. Leaving university to go home and do - what exactly? Sit in his bed for 8 months and wonder where in the world he went so wrong? Where could he possibly be running to that wouldn’t land him right back where he started?

“Seriously, Cheol,” Joshua speaks now, his hand tightening around Seungcheol’s. “Go home and rest. See a doctor if you have to. Whatever you need to do. Whatever it takes.” Joshua’s looking at him so steadily now, and it takes all of his strength to convince himself it’s just the polluted air making his eyes water.

“I will,” he agrees, just as his train pulls into the station. With great reluctance, Joshua pulls away and begins to pick up Seungcheol’s suitcase. Jeonghan clings on for an extra second, then pulls away to fix him with his steady gaze.

“You will come back,”he says again, only this time it sounds like he’s trying to convince himself. Something about that vulnerability in Jeonghan - usually so steady, so snarky, so severely alive - shakes him.

“Of course I will,” he agrees, smiling softly at him and pretending not to see the wet sheen that’s now coating his eyes. “I’ll be back. You know I will.”

Jeonghan nods shakily a few times, as if he doesn’t trust himself to say another word. The shrill whistle of the train erupts suddenly, interrupting their goodbye. Joshua comes darting back, embracing Seungcheol from behind, and suddenly Jeonghan is pressed against his front and he’s surrounded by the people he loves most in the midst of all the breakage of his life.

  
And then, he boards the train. He keeps his laptop tightly shut through the ride, and tries to memorise the green expanse the train hurtles towards. Every second he gets closer to home, he gets farther from the people he loves most. And yet, he doesn’t cast a single glance at his watch. Even though it takes every ounce of his self-control, there’s no list to be checked off today. There’s only silence, and the promise of a second chance. 

**Author's Note:**

> title is from the robert frost poem, stopping by the woods on a snowy evening. also i listened to little hell by city and colour on repeat through this whole thing, so that definitely had some influence.
> 
> as always, kudos/comments whenever you can are greatly appreciated, and thank you for giving this your time <3 
> 
> twt: @wonusloveclub


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